Examination of Factors Affecting the Likelihood of Whether Individuals Would Purchase Cartilage Conduction Hearing Aids

Cartilage conduction hearing aids (CC-HAs) are a novel type of hearing aid relying on cartilage conduction, the so-called third auditory conduction pathway. However, CC-HAs have only recently entered routine clinical use, and therefore data on their usefulness are lacking. The purpose of this study was to examine the possibility of assessing whether individual patients would show good adaptation to CC-HAs. Thirty-three subjects (41 ears in total) underwent a free trial of CC-HAs. Age, disease category, and the pure-tone threshold of air and bone conduction, unaided field sound threshold, aided field sound threshold, and functional gain (FG) at 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, and 4 kHz were compared between patients who subsequently purchased and did not purchase the CC-HAs. Overall, 65.9% of the subjects purchased CC-HAs after the trial. In comparison to non-purchasers, those who decided to purchase CC-HAs showed better pure tone hearing thresholds at high frequencies for both air conduction (2 and 4 kHz) and bone conduction (1, 2, and 4 kHz), as well as for aided thresholds in the sound field (1, 2, and 4 kHz) when using CC-HAs. Therefore, the high-frequency hearing thresholds of subjects trialing CC-HAs might be helpful for identifying those who are likely to benefit from them.